EDUCATION: Environmental jihadists terrorising our children

Fear-mongering about the environment is not new. And using our classrooms to terrorise our kids about supposed environmental catastrophes is not new either. The people doing the terrorising may have good intentions, but they often have hidden agendas as well.

Back in the 1980s, for example, when the Cold War was still raging, our classrooms were often used by radical social engineers to convince our schoolchildren that a nuclear winter was just around the corner. In the name of "peace studies", our kids received steady doses of anti-war, anti-nuclear and anti-Western propaganda.

Indeed, things got so bad that Herbert London penned a book in 1984 entitled, Why Are They Lying to Our Children? In this volume London documented how our educational institutions — from kindergarten to graduate school — were painting a bleak and misleading picture of the future.

Dire prophecies

Schools were full of gloom-and-doom warnings about environmental disaster and the need to limit economic growth. There were dire prophecies about over-population, worldwide famine and irreparable pollution. Coupled with this scare campaign was a strong anti-technology, anti-growth, anti-business and anti-capitalism ideology.

Today, things are no different. Sure, the actual peril may have changed (30 years ago we were being warned about global cooling, while today it is global warming), but the anti-Western agenda is still firmly in place. And our kids are still being assaulted with fear-mongering to get them to comply with the radical agendas.

An appalling example of this can be found on our taxpayer-funded ABC. On the ABC website is something called Planet Slayer, which is designed for young children. Planet Slayer helps kids calculate their carbon footprint, warning them of how long before their emissions will kill "Gaia". But it is not just how long planet earth has, but how long our kids have before they die. "Use our greenhouse calculator to find out when you should die!" it proudly urges our kids.

How's that for shaking up our kids? Hey, let's just strike a little fear and terror into their little hearts and minds — after all, we've got to save the planet, haven't we? Who cares how many little kids have to be terrorised along the way?

But the ABC thinks it's really cool. According to press accounts, "ABC managing director Mark Scott said the site had been developed to 'appeal to children and it's been done in an irreverent way... to make it engaging'."

But not everyone thinks it is such a brilliant idea. Child psychologists, for example, have blasted the site.

Melbourne child psychologist Dr Michael Carr-Gregg said parents should ensure that their children "avoid the site at all costs. It is absolutely ridiculous and clearly inappropriate. You have to ask yourself, 'What would be the purpose of inducing such a high level of guilt in kids?' This site has the potential to do significant damage to vulnerable children."

And some politicians are not too thrilled about the concept either. Victorian Liberal Senator Mitch Fifield asked if it was appropriate for a website meant for children to depict average Australians as "massive, overweight, ugly pigs, oozing slime from their mouths, and then to have these pigs blow up in a mass of blood and guts".

But it seems that anything goes for our environmental jihadists. If terrorising kids is what it takes, then so be it. But such green extremism is par for the course. The radical greens have always felt that their cause is too important to let minor things, such as the well-being of children, get in the way.

Indeed, minor things such as people also must be sacrificed for the greater good of "Gaia". Consider the new book by Gaia prophet James Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia. In the book he argues that our "primary obligation is to the living Earth. Humankind comes second". And he proposes some pretty draconian steps to rescue Gaia.

In a scathing review of this book, Professor Anne Barbeau Gardiner examines the culture of death philosophy that is so much a part of Gaia theory and deep ecology. Her review is well worth reading. But here I just reprint one of her closing paragraphs:

"Gaia Theory and Deep Ecology are two handmaids of the Culture of Death. Their precursor was the eugenics movement of a century ago that imposed birth control and forced sterilisation on the supposedly 'unfit'. Today an artificially created panic about ecological catastrophe, derived from Gaia Theory and Deep Ecology, lies behind a seemingly unstoppable movement for sterile sex by way of birth control, sterilisation, chemical and surgical abortions, homosexuality, and the infanticide of newborns (called 'infant euthanasia').

"Deep ecologists and Gaia theorists try to terrify us with environmental degradation in order to pursue their main program — population control. For even when their prophecies of doom prove to be false or exaggerated, these zealots immediately point to another imminent disaster and call for man to reduce his numbers."

Gloom-and-doom fear-mongering, aimed even at very young children, is part of the radical environmentalists' agenda for getting us to refashion the world in their image. In the name of saving the planet, they are quite happy to terrorise our children and kill off large numbers of our population.

Professor Gardiner is right to conclude: "History shows that none are more fanatical than those on the march to Utopia. The Gaia theorists and the Deep Ecology zealots are certainly marching lockstep right now toward their imagined paradise. The mirage they have in view is one with so few people left on the planet that their great goal will finally be achieved — the total 'non-interference' of man with the wilderness of the Earth. What a dismal, misanthropic idea of paradise!" (Anne Barbeau Gardiner, "Human sacrifice on the altar of Gaia", New Oxford Review, Vol. 75, No. 6, June 2008).

— Bill Muehlenberg is a commentator on contemporary issues, and lectures in ethics and philosophy. His website CultureWatch is at: www.billmuehlenberg.com